Five years before he was shot to death in the failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, Nadir Soofi walked into a suburban Phoenix gun shop to buy a 9-millimeter pistol.

At the time, Lone Wolf Trading Co. was known among gun smugglers for selling illegal firearms. And with Soofi's history of misdemeanor drug and assault charges, there was a chance his purchase might raise red flags in the federal screening process.

While a misdemeanor conviction won't (generally; there are exceptions) disqualify you from buying a gun lying on the form, if detected, will. It appears that said lying was detected and a hold issued originally (to allow investigation) but was released a day later.

While this (now dead) attempted (and poor excuse for a) terrorist is now dead and he failed to manage to kill anyone else with his weapon, the fact remains that there have still been no federal prosecutions of the people responsible for Fast-N-Furious, including Eric (Place)Holder.

There is no longer a "rule of law" when anyone with a sufficient degree of political influence can simply ignore said law. Instead what you have is, quite effectively, this:

An important new medical study finds that chemotherapy does not extend life for end-stage, terminal cancer patients. What's more, those who received chemotherapy treatment near the end of their disease had a worse quality of life than those who didn't.

Got that one?

If you have a terminal cancer diagnosis -- that is, you have a metastatic or otherwise inoperable cancer chemo not only fails to extend your life it damages the quality of life in the time you have left.

Why would anyone go through such a regime?

Simple: You're offered false hope and those pushing said false hope make a hell of a lot of money if they can con you into damaging or destroying your enjoyment of the time you have left.

Nobody wants to face the fact that we're all mortal and we will die some day of something. When that death comes quickly and without warning there's little opportunity for anyone to play on our fears. But all too often you find out a few weeks or months before the end comes that the reaper is on the way, and then the medical machinery goes to work selling you false hope and carefully-couched misleading statistical claims.

I wrote several articles when Provenge was originally developed by Dendreon and faced review. The clinical data showed that it had a median improvement of time-to-live of about 4 months and cost roughly $100,000. Note that there was zero evidence that it produced a durable remission; that is, that the drug actually reversed the progress the cancer was making -- it simply slowed it down somewhat, but at horrific cost.

Dendreon went as high as $57.67 on this hype machine before collapsing with the firm filing Chapter 11 with the wreckage being acquired. Why? Simple: There was no cost-benefit analysis that favored the drug under any reasonable circumstance except when you could force others (e.g. Medicare) to pay for it.

This was obvious at the inception of approval and the expected pricing, but nobody picked up on it. And while Dendreon blew up the fact remains that huge parts of our medical industry run on this same crap on a daily basis, and nowhere is it more-evident than when it comes to metastatic cancer of virtually every sort.

Will this finding change the debate? It ought to -- but you can bet the drug pushers will line up the usual arguments on the other side; "you're trying to kill Grandma!" being one of the most-common.

No, folks, I'm not trying to kill Grandma. Rather, when it is evident that Grandma is going to die I would prefer that she have the facts in front of her on a clean basis without hype or misrepresentation because the time she has remaining is unlikely to be materially extended by these drugs, but the misery of those last months will be increased if she chooses to take them, while the drug companies, doctors and hospitals will be materially enriched at the same time.

Monster (n):

1. Making money by increasing human misery in the last weeks and months of a person's life by peddling false hope and intentionally misleading claims, all for the purpose of selling high-priced drugs at an obscene profit.

KA’ANAPALI, Hawaii—High-level efforts to complete a major Pacific trade agreement ended Friday without resolution amid deep differences over trade in dairy and other products.

U.S. and other officials had hoped to wrap up the final contours of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership this week. Officials in a statement said they made “significant progress” and would work further on a deal, without specifying a future meeting.

The sticking points are in dairy and automobiles.

Guess who was*****ed off about this? Canada, which has tariffs on dairy imports. Oh, and guess what -- the US wants to keep restrictions on dairy products too, but of course we want to drop other tariffs in other places.

Uh huh.

Free trade eh?

Well, not so much -- unless it involves China exporting things here, in which case it's just fine. For the rest, not so much, which is the problem with these so-called "deals" -- they're not really "free trade" at all.

But more to the point is the fact that to the extent they are "free trade" they're really little more than enabling indentured servitude or worse among the "manufacturing" nations. In essence, these deals are really about little more than finding ways to evade wage, working condition and environmental protection laws in developed nations -- most-particularly in the United States.

For this reason "lawmakers" who advocate for and pass these "deals" ought to be treated as having violated the rights of the citizens in the nation involved, indicted, tried and imprisoned.

It didn't go, for example, into all the shale plays that were nicely profitable with oil at $100, but are ruinously underwater with it at $50, right?

It didn't go over into China -- and those companies that sell into that market (e.g. CAT, etc) and their laughably-bogus economic numbers that China has always put out. Incidentally, the margin clerk is on line 1 in relation to those buys you made with borrowed money.....

And it sure as hell didn't go over into Europe -- or here -- "chasing yield" (e.g. in places like Greece, Puerto Rico, etc) -- right?

I bring this up because market detonations aren't really about "recessions" per-se. Rather, they're about outrageous leverage that is enabled by increasingly-unwise transactions that usually, in the end, turn to fraud to cover up the losses.

It is the inevitable cascade of forced selling that comes from this practice that results in the crash, but it is the refusal of the regulatory authorities to put a stop to the bogus crap in the first instance that sets up the necessary conditions for it to occur.

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